The Very Tasty Liberation of Paris

Five years ago, a 29-year-old chef from Chicago opened a tiny, instantly beloved restaurant in Paris called Spring, and that made it official: An unstoppable food revolution was under way. While generations of chefs had fretted about living up to the stifling dictates of French cuisine and earning Michelin stars, a new generation has turned its back on stuffiness and is creating vital, vibrant—sometimes American-influenced—restaurants. In Paris today, the customer and not the chef comes first. Alan Richman tastes the revolution

Can't speak for the citizens of Paris—for that matter, who can even speak to the citizens of Paris?—but for somebody like me, who's been traveling there for forty years and in recent decades has found it almost impossible to stumble on a satisfying meal, bistronomy may be the savior of the city. It's a totally irresistible and entirely revolutionary restaurant movement that deserves a slogan: Liberté, Égalité, Frugalité.

Perhaps you are unaware of the difficulty of eating well in Paris. The city remains beloved by those who shop for cheeses, breads, macarons, a terrine or two, but dining out has regressed. The well-prepared, well-priced meal is becoming extinct, due mostly to the gastronomic shadow government known as the Michelin Guide, which unilaterally created arbitrary dining standards that few dared resist. The result, which I expect Michelin couldn't foresee, is that the price of a lavish meal for two at the grandest restaurants of Paris is about the same as a round-trip plane ticket for two to Paris. In other words, once you get there, you can't afford to eat there. One of the most prominent of the new bistronomy (bistro + gastronomy) chefs, Gregory Marchand of Frenchie, told me that he proposed to his wife before taking her to the Michelin three-star restaurant L'Ambroisie last December and that the dinner went for 1,400 euros, which is about $2,000. He said it was good. (I've had dinner at L'Ambroisie. I find that unlikely.)

The new restaurants are markedly different from what classic French dining has become—regimented, often stultified. The bistronomy chefs repeatedly use the word freedom, practically a battle cry, to describe how creative and unrestrained they feel. Still, the economics of operating fairly priced restaurants in a highly regulated, highly tad environment require that they impose cost savings, and they do so in similar ways. "If we are Robuchon, this meal you are having will be 120 euros," Chantal Colliot, wife of the chef Claude Colliot, told me while I was eating a four-course, fifty-four-euro dinner at the restaurant named for her husband. "And," she added, "we don't make any money." Prices are consistently reasonable, although little in Europe is truly inexpensive today, not with the euro so overblown.

Nothing is rejected as a sin against convention. In fact, so unfettered is this informal alliance that a young American, Daniel Rose, has been welcomed into it. He comes from Chicago and, oddly enough, seems to be one of the most classic of these cooks, his food spun in a style I think of as Nouvelle Old, inasmuch as he is likely to pull out a cookbook from Escoffier, then dress up the chosen recipe with colorful veggies. He surely goes to the greenmarket a lot more than old Auguste did. The menus at most of these restaurants are fid, three or four courses for a set price, which makes food delivery easier on chefs. "Tasting menus are the go-to solution for those of us starting out and not a lot of experience at what we do," Rose said. "An ideal restaurant is one where the customer can eat what he wants." Other characteristics are open kitchens, barely adequate serving staffs, no pastry chefs, tables without cloths, surprisingly pleasant flatware and glassware, and meals that move ever so slowly, although what Americans would consider slow seems perfectly acceptable to the French, who expect to spend two or three hours dining. Some restaurants, such as La Cantine du Troquet, have communal tables, although the experience is more private than a visitor from America might expect. The French do not feel obliged to strike up conversations with strangers who happen to sit beside them.

The restaurants tend to be undersized, often with thirty to forty seats, although Yam'Tcha, a Chinese-French spot where every dish is tailored to the beverage selections of the guests, serves fewer than twenty-five meals per sitting. Friends and I ordered the tea pairings for which the restaurant is famous, and that was the end of our decision-making. Every aspect of our meal was decided by chef Adeline Grattard, beginning with a first course of wontons stuffed with shrimp accompanied by organic green tea from Fujian; then stunning watercress velouté with razor clams and chunks of foie gras as rich as bone marrow, paired with black tea from Yunnan; and finally steamed sandre, a river fish, over Cantonese rice with white tea from Yunnan. Say what you will about wine pairings, which I love, I can't imagine a food-and-beverage combination more striking than green soup with black tea.

Architectural details vary, depending on the fame and finances of the chef. Inaki Aizpitarte, who became inordinately renowned when one influential survey decided that his restaurant Le Chateaubriand was the best in France—yes, the best in the entire nation—opened a second place next door, Le Dauphin. Designed by Rem Koolhaas of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, it's mostly marble, mirrors, and glass, what the chef told me was "an obsession in white." Marchand's Frenchie would do well in New York: brick wall, Edison-style bulbs, industrial lamps hanging over the bar. He described it as a "today bistro," one that could be found in Brooklyn or the East End of London. Giovanni Passerini's Rino is primal: It has all the amenities of a beatnik coffee bar, the kind found in Greenwich Village in the 1950s.

The restaurants are scattered throughout Paris, many of them in arrondissements rarely sought out by visitors. They are destination restaurants masquerading as neighborhood restaurants. Should you dine at Christophe Beaufront's L'Avant Got and order his remarkable fourteen-euro prix fi lunch—I loved my main course, which appeared to be a variation on lamb strudel—you might think less of the bargain after paying fourteen euros to get there by taxi. Almost every Métro ride, should you choose that option, involves a transfer or two and a nice walk once the rail journey is done.

There also seems to be a quirky thread of Basque culture running through the restaurants—chefs from the Basque region, dishes from the Basque region, or in the peculiar case of the remarkable Chez l'Ami Jean, virtually nothing Basque, although patrons still think of it as Basque because it is reputed to be the oldest Basque restaurant in Paris. Basque chefs are held in great esteem in France, the way Philadelphia lawyers used to be admired in America.

The movement has embraced an organization, Le Fooding, which puts out an annual paperback listing its favorite restaurants. It also announces, online, a new restaurant discovery each week. Le Fooding has been in the business of rating restaurants for almost eleven years, compared with the Michelin Guide, which has been giving stars to restaurants since 1926. Explains the founder of Le Fooding, Alexandre Cammas, "We want the food to stay French, but we want the liberty of writing a new identity for French food. We don't want to say it was bullshit before. We feel that everyone in France should be allowed to eat, cook, and write what it means to be French today, and that includes foreigners. We are all fighting to be free, to create future traditions." What is being prepared in these avant-gourmet kitchens is, for the most part, French food unbound. Sometimes it is barely French, as at Yam'Tcha. The undersized kitchen of Ze Kitchen Galerie is crammed with cooks from all over the world: Japan, Korea, the Philippines, America, Portugal, and Italy. (The owner-chef, William Ledeuil, and his sous-chef are French.)

Several of my acquaintances in Paris and New York insisted that bistronomy, despite the slick name, isn't as radical as it appears. They say there have always been chefs, some acclaimed, who have opened downscale spots that attempted to make upscale food available to all. Michel Guérard began his career at a neighborhood restaurant in suburban Paris, Le Pot-au-Feu, getting a Michelin star in 1967 and a second in 1971, before moving to Eugénie-les-Bains, in southwest France, where he invented cuisine minceur. Almost as illustrious is Alain Senderens, who opened L'Archestrate as a rather plain eating spot in the late '60s, then starred at Lucas Carton for twenty years before transforming the property into a relatively modest (but still expensive) bistro-style restaurant. Still, both of these men reached their pinnacle as three-star chefs; they didn't set out to rebel, change cuisine, defy Michelin. They did not have the mind-set that became the catchphrase of these new chefs: The desires of the customer come first. In fact, The New York Times wrote of L'Archestrate in 1982 that "the restaurant exists as a showcase for the chef and his staff, not for the pleasure of those dining." Both men, and for that matter virtually every chef with talent and ego who has worked in France, accepted Michelin as the one pathway to glory.

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Nearly as entertaining as Stéphane Jégo's food is his fuming, providing you know the word that unleashes his rage. I do. It is "Michelin." Jégo, one of the most prominent of the bistronomy chefs, combines the artistry of a rustic maestro with the passion of an Italian grandmother. At his restaurant, Chez l'Ami Jean, he sends out dish after dish to the lucky few able to reserve the one table per seating dedicated to his tasting menu, priced at about eighty euros per person. From the start it evokes sighs, followed several courses later by groans. The meal is presented under a chandelier, the only one in a restaurant otherwise given over to painted cartoons and Basque bric-a-brac. Absurdity is among Jégo's virtues.

His unequaled game terrine, which has the depth of a forest primeval, contains boar, red and gray partridge, duck foie gras, figs, pistachios, and Armagnac. The Old Parmesan Soup, uncharacteristically lightweight and brimming with colors, is accented with grated Parmesan, horseradish, chives, and baby croutons. It is so soulful I now believe Parmesan is wasted atop pasta, the way Italians use it. By the time I reached course four of his eight-course extravaganza, I was staggering. By the main course, sweetbreads so massive they might have been sourced from Jurassic Island, I could no more than wave my fork in feeble surrender. I did rally at the appearance of his fabled rice pudding, so spectacular that our waiter, who had previously not spoken a word of English, was moved to announce, in my language, "Here you have the best, best, best, best rice pudding all over the world." I could not dispute the point.

After lunch—yes, that was lunch—I asked Jégo what I had been told by his friends not to ask him. "Stéphane is crazy," warned Yves Camdeborde, the chef credited with inspiring bistronomy with his restaurant, La Régalade, which opened in 1992. "You shouldn't mention Michelin. He gets insane."

When I first asked Jégo how he and Michelin were getting along, he told me he had recently tossed out representatives of the guide who insisted on taking photographs of dishes he did not believe were representative of his cuisine—a piece of ham, a breast of duck. "I threatened to beat them up," he said. "They lacked respect for me, my purity of approach. I am not capable of entering into the pigeonhole of Michelin." On my next visit, I gently asked if he and Michelin were getting along better, and he told me he had figured out a new form of protest, which consisted of taking his 3-year-old daughter to the most glorious of the Michelin restaurants because "it gets on their nerves." Another of Jégo's friends, Christian Etchebest, chef-owner of the approachable, generous, and homey La Cantine du Troquet, tried to explain Jégo's dilemma to me: "He always wants to prove that his bistro does belong in Michelin, but it is not for himself. It is to show that this new generation of chefs deserves to be there."

Despite the triumphs of this grassroots resistance, the presence of Michelin still hovers over Paris. Not every chef I spoke to is contemptuous or, for that matter, conflicted, about Michelin. Rose, the American, says he hopes to get a star, and Marchand of Frenchie adds, "You can say what you want about Michelin, I don't think any chef says he doesn't want a star." In 1992, when Camdeborde, the Jeanne d'Arc of the movement, left the two-star kitchen of the Hôtel de Crillon, where he had been sous-chef since the age of 23, his dream was to someday have a three-star Michelin restaurant. "That was a goal for us French, something exceptional," he says. Certainly he seemed to be on the path. His La Régalade was at once the most exciting and desirable restaurant in Paris. It was always booked, even though it was located in the obscure Fourteenth Arrondissement, offered no parking, and had sardines on the menu. And Michelin, for unknown reasons, failed to recognize its importance, a mistake rather like the old railway companies in America failing to notice that air travel was becoming popular. I suspect La Régalade was ignored because it didn't follow Michelin's bewildering rules. As the French food writer Fabien Nègre explained to me, "Michelin is impossible to understand. It built its reputation on mystery."

Camdeborde, who subsequently sold La Régalade and now operates Le Comptoir in the Hôtel Relais Saint Germain, which he owns, said of those days, "I wanted to create a location with the same gastronomic quality of the Crillon but where the people could relax. We had bookings one year in advance. And every year Michelin came out, I expected a star. I waited one year, three, five. Then I made a decision that a star is not important."

At Marchand's Frenchie—Frenchie is the nickname he got cooking in London—I ate a sixty-euro eight-course dinner of unanticipated and unwavering stylishness that included foie gras torchon with quince paste, gravlax-style trout with cauliflower cream and shaved cauliflower, sweetbreads with Japanese pear, hake with a matchless black-rice puree, duck breast, as well as the most enthralling of the desserts I tried, cheesecake made from triple-crème Brillat-Savarin, more intense and mysteriously lighter than one made New York–style. Frenchie, despite its size, even has a sommelier, Laura Vidal, a young woman from Montreal who brilliantly paired Canadian ice wine made from apples with Saint-Nectaire cheese. This meal was Michelin two-star food, but it was decidedly not offered in a Michelin two-star setting. Frenchie is located on Rue du Nil, which is not much more than an alley, one so obscure that the two times I went there my taxi drivers denied it existed. It was also forbidding, my first impression being that anything dining there had to be eating its young. When I told Marchand how creepy his street appeared, he replied, "Not now, but 200 years ago, this was one of the most dangerous streets in Paris."

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While the restaurants have the goal of democratizing the dining experience, both in price and in comfort, there does exist within them an unofficial hierarchy, established partly by supply and demand and partly by fame. The four most difficult to book are Yam'Tcha, Frenchie, Spring, and in particular Le Comptoir—Camdeborde is a legend, and hotel guests get priority. Every night, winter included, those without reservations can be found huddling at the few outdoor tables, under heat lamps if necessary. They look like refugees, but they believe themselves privileged to be eating Camdeborde's food. His fifty-euro meal was among the most lavish I sampled while visiting fourteen of these uplifted bistros. The moment you're seated, waiters reach over the heads of guests to offer baskets of gougères, and those are followed by an amuse-bouche of foie gras on toast. The set menu includes a plate of ten exquisitely ripe cheeses, not commonplace even in France. The room is bustling, the waiters are charmingly pushy, and the overall feeling is welcoming. When one of my friends told Camdeborde that several items on his set menu weren't to her taste, he leaned over and whispered to her. She later revealed the secret message: "He told me he had a daughter like me and wanted me to feel at home here." The dishes were altered to please.

Spring is run by Rose, who in 2006 opened a minuscule spot in the Ninth Arrondissement, a long way up from the Napoleonic shrines that glorify the Right Bank of the Seine and a few blocks down from the beefy prostitutes who beautify the windows of the Pigalle bars. He soon found a new location, in the more convenient First, a few blocks from the Louvre, and embarked on a two-year renovation that ended up costing, by his precise count, 1,347,256.34 euros. His staff has increased from three to fourteen, and the capacity of the main dining area is up from sixteen to twenty-six. When I mentioned that profits seemed unlikely under such a business plan, he replied, "I wish you'd told me earlier." Yet he has reason for optimism: As a chef, Rose seems to have perfect pitch, and his exquisitely accessible food is becoming more multifaceted. His unexpected combinations included red mullet paired with an oyster in veal jus, and fried sole alongside blood pudding. When I asked him if he intended to introduce surf and turf to Paris, he claimed the latter combination was purely geographic. "The sole is from Saint-Jean-de-Luz, in the Pays Basque. The boudin came up on the same truck." They were perfect together, as I would not have expected. The second reason why he is likely to survive: He gets as many as 850 requests for reservations a day.

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The career paths of French cooks are usually preordained, and in the most mundane way: Academic incompetence leads to a culinary apprenticeship, which leads to a grinding existence. Only in the past half-century has glamour been associated with cooking, a very few chefs rising to prominence because they are uncommonly good-looking or remarkably talented. Nothing so predictable occurs when bistronomy chefs are involved. Cédric Casanova, a Parisian by birth, operates what must be the smallest and most cramped restaurant in France, located inside his 150-square-foot grocery, La Tête dans les Olives, which specializes in olives, you will not be surprised to learn. Here you will sample all manner of olives and olive oils imported from Sicily, and what you see on the shelves that happens not to be about olives from Sicily is about something else from Sicily. Twice a day he sets up a table that he constructed himself, one that he can assemble and disassemble in seconds. He unfolds chairs, then prepares lunch or dinner. The table seats five, only one party of five is accepted for each seating, and the individual who made the reservation is expected to show up with four others, although Casanova allows fewer as long as someone pays for those who are not there.

The food isn't much. Casanova says of himself, "I am a farmer. I am not a cook." What you will eat for thirty euros per person are olives and eggplant and sun-dried tomatoes of unusual intensity, plus variations on the theme of dried tuna, because, he says, "in Sicily we use tuna like a pig. We throw nothing away." Casanova's culinary stylings, mostly snacks, really don't add up to thirty euros per person on a cost-analysis basis, even when you include his amusing dessert of apples, rum, lemon peel, fennel seeds, and crumbled almond cake, inspired trail food. Casanova is the luminary here. He stands at the far end of his shop, which is not far from the front end of his shop, before a trinket-laden depiction of Santa Maria dell'Olio, whom he reverently describes as the patron saint of olive oil. Behind him, hanging lariat-fashion from a hook, is a thick wire. It is what he used for fourteen years while he was a wire-walker—more precisely, a slack-rope dancer—for more than a few circuses, including Cirque du Soleil. He is 40, not terribly old for the circus, but he says he gave up his career because "my bones are tired and also my knees." Stories like his you do not get when you dine at Alain Ducasse.

His fascination with the circus began when he was a university student, he explains, because "the university is very slow, but the circus is very fast." He started out as an acrobat, but he hit his head on a diving board while showing off for pretty girls, and after that he couldn't twirl through the air without pain. So he switched to wire-walking, not the kind with a wire high up and a net underneath, but the kind eight feet up with a hard floor underneath. In this act, the wire-walker ecutes feats of agility and balance, and too often falls. "I had a very nice fall in 1996 at Caesars Palace," he recalls, smiling at the memory. "The noise was huge."

The most honored of the new chefs is Aizpitarte—a Basque with a Basque name. Each year San Pellegrino, the bubbly-water company, creates a list of the world's fifty best restaurants, and in 2010, Le Chateaubriand was the top restaurant in France and number eleven in the world. (Incidentally, chateaubriand is not on the menu at Le Chateaubriand.) When I told him that made him the most famous chef in France, he replied, deadpan, "If you say so." His culinary training was unlike that of any other renowned French chef: Shortly after his relationship with a tango dancer ended—"My tango is not so good," he admitted—he headed off to Israel, broke and brokenhearted. He took a job cooking, and when he returned to France, he decided to continue cooking. He couldn't afford cooking school, so his only recourse was to knock on doors of not-so-good restaurants, the only ones that would welcome a novice. About this time he began reading about food, little else. "When one wants to, one can learn fast," he says. "That's all there was to it. I learned I could cook my way, in my universe."

I ate at Le Chateaubriand last year, anonymously, and didn't enjoy it. The room is wonderfully old and almost totally untouched, the sort of ancient ambience that gladdens the heart of a tourist. The food was ambitious, too much so, the service chaotic, and my flatware unchanged throughout a five-course meal; it's not fun looking at a spoon caked with the residue of a celery-root soup eaten an hour earlier. Typical of Aizpitarte's dishes was an assemblage that included a chunk of boiled beef, a thin slice of black truffle, what seemed to be slivers of raw nuts, a few slices of uncooked champignons de Paris, and a white foamy topping that I swear our waitress said was made from hay. (Although Paris has been shaken to its reactionary roots by bistronomy, an occasional foam was about as far into the depths of molecular gastronomy or any other form of cerebral cooking that these chefs have ventured.)

I subsequently asked at least a half-dozen friends who had eaten at Le Chateaubriand if they liked their meal, and none of them said they did. The Paris food writer Sébastien Demorand defended the restaurant in an extraordinary manner when I told him I hadn't had a good meal there. "We've all had that experience," he replied, warming up to the challenge of making this appear to be a virtue and not a flaw. "He's challenging you. His food is different. Sometimes strange. He's kind of self-taught, and sometimes it comes out of nowhere. If you want something that always works, go to McDonald's." (Note: Parisians, including the friendly ones, are always telling unhappy Americans who don't like what they're eating to go to McDonald's. It's a bad practice that replaces rational discourse.)

Weeks before I arrived in Paris, Aizpitarte opened Le Dauphin, which everybody was describing as a tapas restaurant but he said was merely a casual spot offering half portions. I rather liked the decor, although I would have appreciated somewhere to put my overcoat instead of having to sit on it while perched on a stool. Le Dauphin was crowded and it was loud, marble and glass tending to have that effect. What I ate was orders of magnitude more coherent than the food at Le Chateaubriand, no more than two or three elements to each dish: raw oysters, small, sweet, and plump, with slices of marinated carrots, a clever way to deliver vinegar without resorting to mignonette sauce; tandoori octopus, bright red and perfectly tender; milk-fed lamb, perhaps cooked sous vide, with mostarda; thickly cut beef tartare enlivened with sweet spices; and my favorite, black-ink risotto, as good as any I've had in Italy. Giovanni Passerini's Rino—named for a trio of inspirations, including the singer Rino Gaetano—is entirely dissimilar to the glittery Le Dauphin. It is located on Rue Trousseau, another of those drab-approaching-desolate streets that will fill you with either the thrill of exploration or a frisson of dread. One of my guests found the interior of the restaurant so spare she said it reminded her of a pop-up restaurant. Passerini has a degree in economics, earned at a Rome university, which entitles him to be addressed by the honorific dottore. He did not seem offended when I declined to do so. He is astonishingly gaunt, Gandhi-like, although the women at my table thought him handsome and were moved by his devotion to food and family. "My girlfriend is patient," he said. "When I go out in the morning, she is sleeping. When I come home at night, she is sleeping." He seemed desperately dreamy to them.

His is a life devoid of indulgences, which is precisely what he wishes. He speaks with pride of his tiny kitchen with its multitude of miniature refrigerators, welcoming the challenge of finding space in them for the abundance of fresh food he requires, four lambs the day I was there. "It is a difficult place to work but romantic, because everything passes through my hands, and when it passes through the hands of the chef, that is romantic," he said. During the meal the music was Sam Cooke, so soft it was barely discernible. Service concluded with John Fogerty, loud and rousing. Passerini prepares four-course meals that sell for thirty-eight euros, and his inexpensive wine list comes smartly folded in an envelope. (Having tasted two of his selections, I would recommend marking the envelope RETURN TO SENDER.) His food isn't generally Italian, because he believes Italian food should be made only with Italian products, which are too expensive for him to import.

My first course was nonetheless somewhat Italian, tortelli stuffed with light, rich whipped potatoes in a bowl of smoky consommé. Other dishes were entirely creative—sophisticated, colorful, and wonderfully prepared, especially considering the limitations of a kitchen that barely exists. I did complain to Passerini about his duck breast after it came well seared on the skin side but essentially raw on the other. (It was similar at Frenchie, making me fear I was in Paris at the beginning of a worrisome trend.) I've had fish that way and loved it, but I found it less appealing with duck, where the almost raw parts are tough. His response to my complaint: "Sometimes you have to chew a little bit. We have forgotten how to chew."

Claude Colliot, of the restaurant named for him, has been cooking since the age of 14, which isn't unusual in France, but he has always worked for himself. That's unusual, since French technique is more about ritual than instinct. "I have been the same way as this for twenty-five years," he says. "No schools, only learning by myself. I never worked for any famous chefs. That's why it has taken longer for me to succeed." His main dining room is so dark it appears colorless, and guests eating in it seem to dress to match the decor. On the evening I dined there, everybody except the people at my table was in gray and black. Let me tell you, it's been a long time since I lit up a room. Colliot's cuisine, fitting the mood, is austere. It's also strikingly healthy, all his dishes accompanied by a mélange of barely cooked, decidedly crunchy vegetables that his wife, who is the hostess, collects twice a week, riding thirty miles on a Vespa to a farm to gather crops. The food is unusual and original: a soup of foie gras cream (indeed, even that seemed restrained and wholesome), cold and briny oyster sorbet, and a wonderful dessert named All White, which consists of fromage blanc topped with lychee sorbet topped with soft meringue. I was convinced of the freshness of the products when his wife told me the lychees had shown up that morning, and when she tried to eat a few, her husband yelled and chased her out of the kitchen.

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Michelin and Le Fooding appear to be of two worlds, one setting standards, the other encouraging free will. Yet they do not always disagree. In 2009, Adeline Grattard of Yam'Tcha was selected as Le Fooding's best female chef. The next year, she received a Michelin star. In fact, the organizations function in similar ways. Both are marketing machines, Michelin far vaster in scope. Both appear to have responsible restaurant-reviewing ethics, which means paying for meals. That cannot be said of the majority of critics operating in France.

Michelin sells tires, promotes its brand relentlessly, and demands the presence of its three-star chefs at vital events, such as the unveiling of a restaurant guide in a new country. Few have the courage to refuse. In addition to its print and online reviews, Le Fooding is in business to create partnerships with companies, organize meetings, and put on food events at which star chefs appear. The young founder, Alexandre Cammas, is a funny, friendly, untroubled amalgam of idealism and commercialism, eager to change the world of French food and to make a nice living while doing so. He calls the events he produces "big parties where people have fun."

What's remarkable about both these organizations is that they thrive despite apparent conflicts of interest, possibly because neither seems fatally corrupt. Michelin inspectors are mythic. They're envisioned as honorable and frugal culinary crusaders, trudging from town to town, eating alone and drinking sparingly, ordering a half-bottle of wine and a half-bottle of mineral water. Says Rose, "I have great respect for those individuals. Those guys are on the road endlessly. Maybe the Michelin company is run by an appointee with an agenda and a sales objective, but do I want to gain the respect of those inspectors? Absolutely." Then, abruptly, he sounds like a devotee of the Le Fooding philosophy when he adds, "Is it more important to have a restaurant full of real customers who enjoy their meal and want to reserve a table for the next time? I think so."

Paris is now a city with a populace longing for restaurants it can embrace. It's important to remember that in France, until now, the customer has never been right. As Camdeborde put it, "With Michelin, it is the restaurant and the chef thinking whether or not the client deserves them. The basis of eating should be whether the restaurant deserves the client." The new restaurants seem to have whatever customers need, unless they require shimmering brocade curtains, a selection of artisanal butters, and a half-dozen waiters hovering tableside. The cuisine is enviable, and if it might not always be what Jégo of L'Ami Jean claims it is—"the same food others are doing in their Michelin-starred restaurants"—it's close enough to bring intense joy and a sense that nothing vital is lacking. You want inspiration? There's plenty of it, even if these harried chefs have only a day to create a new dish, not a month, as in the three-star operations. If it's black truffles and foie gras you require, try Franck Marchesi-Grandi's L'Agrume for the foie gras and smoked eel in a nori wrapper, followed by the roasted pears and black-truffle ice cream topped with julienned black truffles. The new restaurants may lack amenities, but if you're comfortable with a dining experience that is more like an informal dinner party than an evening out, you'll feel as though you haven't missed a thing.

The one near-traumatic problem with these restaurants is getting in. Should you manage to acquire a reservation, you will feel like an insider, which is always unexpected in Paris. The real flaw in bistronomy is that a movement with the ultimate goal of making food more accessible has been a stunning failure in that regard. It has put fine dining out of reach in an entirely different way. A Parisian friend of mine who made the reservations for every one of my meals said to me, "I had to beg. I didn't know I could beg like that."

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